Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Friday March 10, 2006 @04:25AM
from the apples-and-oranges dept.

DietFluffy writes "Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."

Emulation is hard. The Wine project has been started 13 years ago, and they still support only a handfull of applications. Apple has only been able to emulate their past architectures because they owned or licensed all the specifications for them. To emulate Windows would mean to use reverse engineering, which is a whole different ball game, and to expose themselves to potential lawsuits from Microsoft.

Plus, if there's anything to be learned from the whole OS/2 experience it's that perfect emulation of your rival's platform brings no market advantage.

In my opinion, Apple would just use a virtual machine and tell users to run Vista in that. For them, it is the perfect solutions. People would still have acces to their strategic apps on their platform, and there would also be a great incentive to port them to run natively on MacOS.

And WINE's progress is a poor example. Part of the reason for its slow pace is that there hasn't really been as strong a need for it as there is today. Until Intel-based Macs appeared, there was no real compelling need for WINE - it ran on x86 boxes that could boot Windows anyway. Now we have x86 boxes that can't boot Windows, WINE's API-level Windows app support is a somewhat interesting for Mac users.

I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.

WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.

But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.

There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.

I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.

If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.

According to the w3schools site [w3schools.com], As of Feb2006, market share is approximately:

Windows : 89.8%Linux.. : 03.4%Mac.... : 03.6%

Most notably, the overall share of Mac and Linux have grown steadily while Windows has shrunk at about the same rate. I agree that I doubt MS decided not to support EFI based solely on the new Intel Mac strategy, but marketshare analyses are not the way to point it out.

The point comes down to this: MS would benefit by allowing Mac hardware to boot Windows. A copy sold is a copy sold. Besides, MS already sells a Mac version of Virtual PC with a Windows license for hardly more than just a copy of Windows itself, so it's clear that they have no issue with people running Windows on Mac hardware.

I'm more willing to bet that EFI support is just one more vaporware feature that MS ran out of time to implement for Vista. Every time I hear of yet another Vista feature being axed, I have to wonder if anyone will care about Vista when its released -- what will it actually do for us?

The parent may have been moderated as "troll", but its TRUE, and annoying. I have signed up for the Vista beta testing program, and was quite pissed off to find out that they STILL arent supporting my SATA controller (SiI-3112 non-RAID configuration). We where hoping for support of the more common controllers back with Windows XP SP2. Here it is a few YEARS later, and I cant even install the latest Vista beta.

I spoke to a chap about 9 months ago on shacknews.com and hardocp.com about Vista,... apparently the MS team who handle the F6 floppy / SATA / install section of the installer didn't (and still don't!) realise there's a problem with needing a fucking FLOPPY disk to install the storage drivers!The chap on the team who is / was a friend of the guy I spoke to said he needed proof or some kind of evidence (large thread? web petition?) to convince the rest of his team / management that installing drivers from U

The chap on the team who is / was a friend of the guy I spoke to said he needed proof or some kind of evidence (large thread? web petition?) to convince the rest of his team / management that installing drivers from USB or CD is smart.

How about the fact that many computers today do not come with a floppy drive pre-installed, but have optical drives and on-board SATA? Hell, I've seen computers without PS/2 ports: you must use a USB keyboard and mouse. In some ways this is a lot better. Get rid of the legacy connections that while potentially useful, are not necessary. Same with the floppy. Why should a manufacturer spend $5 on a floppy when they can simply not put one in and charge the same price?

The real issue, as this thread demonstrates, is that the software manufacturers still rely on legacy technology.

I hate to rain on you MS-trashing party, but Microsoft already DOES support EFI. EFI is, after all, a PC technology, developed for the Itanium, not something Apple designed for their systems. The summary of the article is quite simply wrong. Vista will support EFI in the 64-bit version, for 64-bit chips, this being a technology designed for a 64-bit processor. In fact 64-bit XP and 2003 ALREADY support EFI. What will not be supported is EFI on 32-bit chips, since no one is doing that except Apple.

Elilo is probably your best bet. It does Linux on macs and there is no reason I can think of why you should be able to boot another os with it. I will have to wait to figure it out cuz the macbooks are in horribly short supply in my neck of the woods..

I used to leave a 150 MB FAT16 partition on my HD to store data for flashing the BIOS etc. I'm not sure if I could have booted from it, though I probably could have. Instead I just put the new BIOS image there and booted from a standard DOS boot CD and accessed the FAT16 partition within DOS. Worked fine. Alternatively you can just write a new CD with the right image, obviously, with the downside that you can't easily backup the current image. Finally, these days I'd just boot from a USB memory stick, which is the spiritual heir of the floppy in any event. Oh and you can flash the BIOS from within Windows, although that gives me the creeps, too.

You are quite lucky, sir. I've had incredible problems with exactly this: the BIOS installers are generally poorly written pieces of proprietary and unreliable garbage which do not handle even the slightest deviation from their standard use, such as putting them on a CD.

Fortunately, the 64-bit system I trashed the BIOS on this way was a test box: it turned out to be simpler to open up the boxes and temporarily install a floppy drive for exactly this use.

Ive flashed my bios on both Asus boards in my house from windows without a hitch. It was actually quite easy

1. Run Program
2. It automagicly Downloads what's needed
3. Click Okay
4. Wait 10 seconds
5. Profit !!! ???
One of the asus boards was a P2B Slot1 (PII 350 100MHz Bus) and a A8V 939 (Athlon64 3000+ @ 200MHz FSB) and ive seen not an issue. Windows won't magicly crash during those 10 seconds and I doubt it really will or else asus won't let you flash from windows.
You guys really gots to get out of the "Windows is unstable" crap. This isn't Windows 98 ive seen desktop XP systems get months and months of uptime without any problems.

For fun I decided to run windows vista and it seems to already be using EFI because it makes a "Boot" directory in both Windows Drives (XP MCE and Vista) and an "EFI" directory containing fonts. So there going to remove the feature from the beta ??

I once thought I could get away without 3.5 floppies anymore. I was wrong.

In my virtual crusade againt windows installers in this century, have to add that the only thing you really need floppy disks these days is the windows installer, since it can not load drivers from anything else than drive a

Other than that, there has not been FDDs in my machines I use for more than 6 years now. Flashing bios can be done by booting from cd/dvd or usb.

Come on, support for optical drives? Or even networking? Do you have an idea how long it takes to load drivers for every single NIC ever produced? Because that's what you have to do in order to support networking from a boot CD - at least it appears that Microsoft is thinking like that. I'd really appreciate them to finally discover hardware detection and put that on the boot CD.

And for the installation not mysteriously hanging when executed on my system, leaving me unable to fix my Windows for the new ma

I'm not at all excited by the idea of shutting down my computer just to use another operating system.

Anybody who's used a virtualization product like VMWare knows what I'm talking about. That is where it's at.

You can run another operating system in a window without leaving your current OS. It's not an emulator in any traditional sense of the word; things run at (or a few percent shy of) native speed. The only downside is that you need enough RAM to run both operating systems simultaneously in a comfortable fashion, but 2GB of RAM is under $200 these days.

I'm going to buy an Intel Mac as soon as VMWare releases an OSX version of VMWare or an open-source implementation reaches that level of quality (there are some strong contenders). I'm willing to put down the cash to run Windows on an Intel Mac, but dual-booting isn't even part of the equation.

Amit Singh and his friends at IBM got XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac [osxbook.com]. As he says, "To anybody who has used Windows XP under Virtual PC on the PowerPC version of Mac OS X: you will simply be blown away by how fast Windows XP runs under VMware on the new hardware." So that's good news. Now someone just has to make it work under OS X directly.

> > "XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac..."> Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?

Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.

start linux, start vmware in linux, start XP, start vmware in XP, start linux on vmware on xp on vmware on linux, then you can unplug the iMac and carry it off leaving the operating syatems hanging in mid-air in an endlessly self-supporting loop.

With Vanderpool virtualisation technology, you can run multiple concurrent OSes directly on the hardware. As opposed to VMWare or VirtualPC, which emulate a system abstracted out, hardware virtualisation lets you run two systems (e.g. OS X and Windows Vista) at the same time directly on the hardware. Perhaps you would still be running it inside of VMWare or VirtualPC just to provide a management interface, but it's just as real as booting o

Just buy a freakin console. Your life will be MUCH easier and the copy protection in the games will not screw up your PC.

sheesh.

Just because consoles fill your gaming desires doesn't mean they fill everyone's gaming desires. Tell me which console can play Civ 4. I know the game is probably being developed for the Mac right now, but I already own the Windows version. It would be nice to be able to play it and many of my older PC games on my shiny new MacBook.

I own consoles as well, and I love some of the games that are only available for them. I also love my PC games, many of which don't have a console port, or the port is inferior.

VMWare is a very fine product, and I too look forward to seeing it on a Mac. A friend of mine solved a rather hairy Windows problem by running multiple virtual NT machines under VMWare, since he wasn't allowed to ditch NT altogether (decisions made many, many levels above his customer).

In the application in question, they had 21 NT hosts running their web apps. In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours. The permanent fix was to run NT under VMWare: the NT instances still failed, but restarting one from a pristine state became a five-second operation.

For a bonus, they picked up enough performance from Linux's paging versus NT's utterly brain-dead paging, that they were able to free all but three of the 21 machines that had been using to other tasks.

The answer to a broken OS is to run it in a penalty box under a working OS.

Oh man, I can't believe all of the people I hear saying they'll get an Intel Mac as soon as it can run Windows. I think all of these people are going to be a little surprised when they realize their Windows partition has been doing little more than gathering dust for several months;)

The best would be if VMWare was its own O/S, sharing resources equally between installed operating systems, so no single operating system has an edge on performance, plus VMWare would have an option to 'freeze' one operating system so as that the other runs at full speed (running a game, for example).

I've got a PowerBook at the moment, and will definitely be upgrading to a Macbook Pro in the near future. Being able to run MS Windows on it at (near) native speed would be a huge bonus for me, but I've got zero interest in dual booting to get that. I don't give a rats ass about running games under windows; I hardly have enough free time in my life to play WoW on my PowerBook more than a few times a week (without getting into trouble with my other half).

What I really need it for is those work occasions where I run into equipment that needs a dedicated Windows app to manage it, and dual-booting to deal with that is just stupid. I need a good native virtual environment I can just fire up in a minute, do my work and then close it down. VPC on PowerPC just doesn't cut it. It's way too slow.

The things I'm keeping an eye on...... QEMU + Accelerator seems to be the only choice for Intel OSX right now. VMware are apparently showing interest (but nothing solid yet) and another outfit called iEmulator.com are supposed to have an Intel port of their existing Mac OSX product in the pipeline.

If Xen worked I'd be delighted, but there seem to be problems that are going to take some time to work out. 1) there is no Intel VT support in the current Intel Mac's, and 2) Moshe Bar has said that "OS X has its own virtualization technology that interferes with Xen". Apparently he's been able to get FreeBSD and Debian working, but Apple's protectiveness of its hardware specs has so far prevented Bar from getting the graphics, sound or Wi-Fi to work.

Wooo!! let me know how fast you can use 3dsmax or f.e.a.r. or any other 3d application or games.And if you don't use them, tell me why you need Windows on your Mac...

While accelerated 3D is absolutely critical for some people that run Windows apps, it's not something that most people need - especially if you remove gaming (I do love F.E.A.R., btw) from the equation. At that point, you're basically just talking about people that use 3D modeling apps.

I develop Windows software for a living, but I think OSX is an amazing OS and I prefer to use it when possible and am slowly getting my feet wet with OSX development.

There is no need to by RAM from Apple. When I bought by G4 Powerbook, and RAM-Upgrade from Apple would have cost me 800 Eur or so - instead I bought two Kingston 1GB SO-DIMM modules for 140 Eur each (at that time) and they work just fine.

Redmond - In a surprising turn of events Microsoft held a press conference yesterday stating that Windows Vista will not support the 32 bit mode of Intel 80386 and compatible processors. When asked about why this feature was left out from the release lead coder Alfred E. Newman replied: "We felt that 32 bit support was just not ready for Vista. The NT line of operating systems is still too cutting-edge to be used in the productivity powerhouse that Vista is going to be." Instead, Microsoft will deploy a new version of MS-DOS as the operating system's foundation. The new DOS, called "MS-DOS 2006" will feature improved support for TSRs and the capability of automatically loading supporting programs directly into extended memory, allowing it to have all 640 kilobyte of conventional memory ready for applications that depend on it.
Microsoft promised that all other proposed Vista features (except for those already canceled) will "have a chance of making it into Vista". When asked about whether customers coud be expected to put up with Vista's proposed 480 installation floppies Newman replied: "What, me worry?"

The new decision was universally met with conetempt within the Apple world. "They think that pushing the MS-DOS version number from 7 to 2007 is a big step," Random MacGeek from AppleRumorsUpYourButt.com commented, "but we clearly had the biggest version number jump when Bungie went from Marathon 2 to Marathon: Infinity. Microsoft is late to the game, as always."
When asked about the topic of Microsoft being late to the game Apple replied: "It's true! Microsoft promides to buy me and GNU here a beer at the game. Now it's halfway over and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen!" "We're not going to invite Microsoft to the next game," GNU added, "we have better things to do with our time than to spend it waiting for some guy from Redmond."

Quote from the article: "It said its decision to 'reprioritise'[sic] EFI development to the server version of Windows was based on a lack of available desktop PCs with EFI support on the market."

Maybe the reason that there are no desktop PCs with EFI support is because everyone knows that Windows still only boots on BIOS. If Microsoft was serious about jump-starting a move to EFI (or any other alternative) they would support it now, and watch the hardware follow.

I wonder if this is due to laziness, maliciousness, or a combination of both?

I guess this means that someone is going to have to hack a Linux bootloader to boot Windows. Maybe something with elilo. It's be kinda cool for these [mactel-linux.org] guys to say, "Sure. You can run Windows on an Intel Mac. You just gotta install Linux first!"

Does anybody give a damn? I mean seriously, did anyone out there actually BUY a new Intel mac counting on the rumors that it MIGHT be able to run windows sometime soon? If so, why?

And does this really come as a suprise to anyone anyway? "Oh my God! Someone tries to update the x86 architecture in a meaningful way and Microsoft arrives late to the Party: Drunk, kicking, and screaming! Who knew that might happen?"

I for one was counting on the rumors that my new mac mini would be able to run windows. Why? Games. Although it'll take more than just EFI to play games in M$ Windows on an intel mac (drivers etc.), EFI is an important step towards that goal.

You're obviously not a Windows user, nor a gamer, since the ONLY use of Windows is to play games anyway. Maybe view pr0n as well, but you can do that better on a Mac already...

I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not/. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.

Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense:-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.

I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for;-).

BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me:-).

BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from?

Casablanca. [vincasa.com] (1942)RENAULT (Claude Rains): I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!The croupier comes out of the gambling room and up to Renault.CROUPIER: (handing Renault a roll of bills) Your winnings, sir.

I'm really worried now! It seems like almost every feature boasted in Vista has been pulled. Database filesystem and all that? What will be left that isn't essentially Windows XP with a much larger greed for memory and other hardware requirements?

Basic mouse support will be added in Service Pack 1. Mouse buttons will be supported in SP2 scheduled for 2012. For now you can use the beta version of keyboard interface or stable punchcard input.

For now the problems to be solved is authenticating the mice with the system as a part of increased security, so that no mice from unreliable vendors would be installable. In case of a 3rd party non-approved mouse your system and house will be remotely locked down and the whole block napalmed under the rules of DMCA and Patriot act. So far the system is being beta-tested to remove all false positives, the bugs hindered progress but opened career positions in Microsoft for many new brave beta-testers.

Sorry to disappoint you comma the mouse has been deprecated in capital Vista dot There's only voice commands now dot end comment close no not the browser not the BROWSER I said ah it's back wait now there's two damn computer no don't load damn.com start START START!

Supporting EFI would be supporting competition. Incentive to abandon Microsoft."I want a computer that's good for gaming and graphics. Either PC or the new Intel Mac, which I'd dual boot, OS X for gfx, Vista for games."

EFI supported:"So, supposedly Mac is better for gfx than PC, let's try it... Wow, this OS X rocks and Vista sucks. I'm gonna get a PS3 for games and drop Vista altogether, staying with OS X."EFI not supported:"Well, there is Photoshop for Vista and no games for OS X, so I'd better buy a PC so I have both games and photoshop. Well, it sucks, but I bet OS X would suck just the same if I ever tried it."

OTOH, Apple most certainly does not see it your way – had they thought that the ability to boot windows would improve their market share, they would have included a CSM in their EFI implementation, and thus made possible to boot Windows easily.

As I understand it, one of central features of EFI was the hardware level encryption and digital signing happening between core motherboard components, an intergral part of the Trusted Computing Platform implementation - which Windows Vista was supposed to fully support? If Vista has to use the old BIOS architecture is there hope still for freedom or is there another way to tie us onto the TC-shackles?

And does this mean Apple's products will be the only ones that fully implement the TC platform idea both in hardware and operating system level. I seem to remember the Macintosh launch involved an ad related to the year 1984, can't seem to remember exactly what it was about (mind blanked out)...

So Vista is coming to seem more and more like an XP service pack with a massive price tag and unwelcome restrictions. I don't know why Gates doesn't throw in the towel and announce that from now on the chair of Microsoft will be held on a rotating basis by the chairs of the major Hollywood studios. All Microsoft seem to be doing these days in the consumer market is kowtowing to the content providers while trying to grab a slice of the action for themselves. Microsoft offer no vision, no inspiration or feel-good factor. It's a pathetic end to the dream of a computer on every desk. What we have instead is a glorified credit card processor.

"The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X"

As most owners will be 'traditional' mac users, I don't think this is a real issue.

The article also reads: Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It just shows that Microsoft doesn't understand true concepts of usability, innovation and excellence. As most Windows users enjoy crippled systems, using Mac OS X will come as relief to those who dare to swap. Unless you're gaming all day...

The more I think about it the more I think that if Microsoft ever provides official support for installing Windows natively on a Mac then it very likely will be the end of MacOS X and eventually Apple.

Why? Because in general developers want "one true" operating system to develop for, often religiously so. I have heard people tell Mac users to "just get a PC" to run popular Windows-only software, but that is not a realistic expectation. That would be asking the Mac user to throw away thousands of dollars of hardware, and is generally considered unreasonable.

If it ever becomes possible to easily install any version of Windows on a Mac in a manner that is supported by Microsoft, even if not by Apple, then these same people will demand that Mac users "just install Windows" to run their software. And they will consider that to be perfectly reasonable thing to do - they are adding something to they system and taking nothing away. They could afford an expensive Mac, so certainly they can afford to spend a few more buck for Microsoft Windows, right? And if it is running natively on the Mac rather than in VirtualPC developers will not worry that they might be making the users work in a crippled or limited environment.

Then in time no one will see the need to develop MacOS X applications any more and all Mac users will be forced to use Windows.

Apple will then be just another boring commodity PC maker like Dell or Gateway.

So let's please stop even thinking about running Windows on the Mac. It just isn't cool.

Well, there are already around a million fewer Mac operating system computers in service today than there were five years ago*, and now there's the inherent bumpiness of a platform change (especially for Carbon apps). So there's already going to be a loss of ISVs around at least the edges anyway.And the Windows emulation experience on Intel Macs is already going to improve, both because of the closer-to-native execution and the fact that the Intel Macs won't lag in performance behind PCs like the later-gen

1) I never boot my Mac... so how and why should I dual boot? (exception: OS upgrades that require one)
Thats especially true for laptop (Pwerbook, MacBook Pro, iBook) owners, you only sleep the Mac and wake it up when needed.

2) No one having a Mac would boot into Windows, why? Because he likely has no access to his Data on the Mac Partition, no eMails, no Adresses, no Calendar etc. It makes no sense to boot into Windows.

If a Mac user *needs* Windows and wants to use it he uses a Virtual PC or OpenOSX or soon vmware. Of course you use a virtualized PC, because then you don't have to boot, and not to dual boot at least, and you have the advantage to access the data from both platforms on the other platform.

No sane Mac user will use MS Office for Mail (Outlook etc.) and/or IE for browsing but will use his Mac Software for most of his work, so booting into Windows is very unlikely.

This is ridiculous! The story is, the crippled (I am amazed they are even releasing it) 32-bit version of Vista won't support the odd mac-only combination of 32-bit chips, and EFI. The 64-bit version of Vista, will support the standard configuration of 64-bit chips, and EFI, just like XP 64 already does.

I love all the comments about how far behind Apple MS is, as proven by the fact that they can't even get EFI working. No, they have it working, just on modern 64-bit systems. Apple is the only company on earth that decided to go with a brand new technology like EFI, and then stick 32-bit chips on a 32-bit OS in their system! If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64-bit Vista will boot on it just fine. This is one of those cases where the problem isn't how far behind MS is on their support for EFI, but how far behind Apple is on their choice of x86 chips. I have no idea why Apple let itself get talked into dumping a 64-bit architecture, just to get what basically amounts to some fast dual-core P3s, but they did.

>If Apple actually comes out with a 64-bit machine (like most modern PCs), I'm sure 64->bit Vista will boot on it just fine.

Apple does have a 64-bit machine, the G5. It seems to me that the Core-Duo Intel Macs are just a stopgap until the next Intel Core processors are released in the second half of this year, which are 64-bit. If anything, this is Intel's fault for not starting the Core architecture as a 32-bit platform, then moving to 64-bit for the second rev.

Plain and simple. Microsoft knows that if you can run Windows on a Mac, more people may actually purchase a Mac. Then the comparison will start, and in my opinion, end very quickly. OS X is and will be light years ahead of Vista and Microsoft knows this.

Windows supports EFI. Here, now, today. Has been for years. Currently is. Except only on the IA64 architecture. This makes the article partly bullshit, and a large amount of comments here as well. But the bullshit doesn't stop here.

Of course the thing about drivers being stored entirely in EFI is completely false, misleading and somewhat retarded (it really depends on how twisted your idea of drivers is. If you come from a Linux background there's a 9 in 10 chance you are clueless and forever jaded about it). Of course the DRM comments here don't make the slightest sense, since TPM chips are here, now, have been for years, and they work with the old, usual, actually-existing BIOS extensibility interface (i.e.: drop a function pointer somewhere, get called). Have you bought an IBM laptop or workstation that was made some time after the Cretacean? congratulations! your cute little black box is Trusted Computing compliant (r), (c) and (TM)!

From a more technical point of view: Windows doesn't depend on legacy hardware. It used to, in ye olden days (until before Windows Server 2003 R1), but it was so easy to get around it with software emulators (provided by Microsoft herself, as part of Windows NT 4 Embedded, Server Appliance Kit for Windows 2000 Server, et cetera) that only people with a really small penis complained. Nowadays it's a matter of the right boot loader and Hardware Abstraction Layer (all aboard the cluetraaain! if you are among the differently-endowed mouth breathers who confuse "instruction set" with "hardware" - and you know if you are one - this might just be your chance to finally get it!).

Technical trivia: the Windows boot loader is a beauty. It totally mops the floor with anything in the wild, save maybe for Grub. The horrid ntldr flat executable is just a teeny weeny stub containing the real thing, a PE executable called osloader.exe (with a resource section, even - the description simply says "Boot loader"; sadly it has no icon) which is the universal loader - why, yes, your humble peecee can network-boot too! In short, the little bugger comes with a full SCSI+ATAPI stack (it can even stay loaded and be used by the kernel as the SCSI class driver - no shit!), a network stack for the TFTP client (yep) and its very own hardware abstraction layer, since the thing was written against ARC (think EFI, only for the Alpha AXP architecture) which is only really available on Alpha. The thing is a driver model short of a full operating system

So, reconsider the length of your penis in the light of these new facts

This is actually playing out exactly as I predicted. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to boot any of their OS's on a MacBook Pro or any other Intel-based Mac, because doing so would mean the slow "death by irrelevance" of their VirtualPC product they bought from Connectix a few years ago.

The beauty of forcing a Mac user to run Windows through the VirtualPC product is Microsoft can sell them a legal software license bundled with the product, making it an easy "one stop" way to collect the entire revenue stream. If they simply coded booting support for EFI on MacBooks into Vista, they'd encourage a lot more piracy. (How many Mac users do you know who despise Microsoft - and would justify running a bootleg copy of Vista in dual-boot mode as "So what? It's not really my primary OS anyway, and Microsoft doesn't need to get any more of MY money!"?)

On the flip-side, the next version of VirtualPC will be able to completely drop all the x86 emulation code, and simply become a "sandbox" that fools a Windows OS into booting up inside of it, and then passes all the x86 instructions to the Intel-based Mac's CPU natively. This will let them brag about the incredible performance boost in the latest version of VirtualPC, etc. etc.

The only thing I'm not sure about is if MS will decide to simply drop support for PPC based Macs at some point, keep both VirtualPC 7 and this new "version 8?" version as branded for "Intel Macs only", or actually code all of it together, so the traditional PPC emulation stuff is automatically installed/used where needed, and the alternate code for Intel-based Macs used where possible?

Exactly. One could do something like emulate a "classic" BIOS. EFI starts something that adversises to be a Operating System, but in reality it just starts a "classic" BIOS. That BIOS is then used to load a BIOS-dependent Operating System like Windows.

Apple just chose not to include it, for the obvious reason that they don't need it.

I expect standard bootloaders in the free software world will all support EFI by the end of this year, if they don't already. I don't know if you'd need an EFI-specific live-CD / install CD too for CD installs.

Simple really - because OS X is still lacking in certain software.The OS is great. Really. The hardware is a bit overpriced, yes but let's face it, it *is* oh so desirable!

But there is still a ton of software out there that doesn't come in OS X flavour. Notably games.

And to get the absolute maximum performance for Windows games, you'd want to dual-boot, not use some VMware system....Hang on...Did I just use the words "performance" and "windows" in the same sentence? I need more sleep....

...since we're constantly hearing from Mac owners how wonderful OS X is, then why would they give a damn about this?

Good question. I've been a Mac owner since '96 (and a Unix/C/C++/Perl/Java/Oracle/etc/etc/etc programmer for far longer) and I see no reason. I have to use Windows at work, and after a long day of fighting Windows, I look forward to using OS X at home. Personally, I have no desire to have Windows on a Mac, but I can think of three reasons why others might:

The article explains quite clearly why Microsoft will not be supporting EFI:Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch.

If you read an article about the PC boot process (been on/. long time ago), you'd see the drudgery of climbing up the ladder of legacies to bootstrap a PC with BIOS.Even if you have two dual-core Athlons 64, you start with a single CPU in 286-compatiblity mode. You need to climb all the way up, starting with ancient 8-bit instructions to enable 16-bit, get out of the 640K memory limitations, floating math co-processor, pull all the hardware from legacy compatiblity modes (all gfx cards by default start in

Soory, but will not be a bad idea if you read an 80386 users' manual...

286 processors and up start in what is know as real-mode. like the original 8086. That is the 16 bit mode.
There is not 8 bit mode (not any more, and I think that was only available in the nec v20 AFAIK).

VGA cards do not start-up in CGA mode. They are initialized by the VGA BIOS in text mode, compatible to CGA but is not the same because 480 vertical lines (plus retrace) are used instead of 200 plus retrace.

BTW, newer graphic cards don't even support all C/E/VGA modes anymore, and I think that has benn for almost for 8 years more or less.

I don't think that the setup of the protected mode should be done in BIOS, but some useful mode (better than the crappy real-mode) should be enabled.May be some flat mode (32 or 64 bits).

On the other hand, you don't enable more than protected mode, the "features" are always available (but maybe just in protected mode the instruction don't produce illegal opcode... I don't know that.)

Incidently, for all the superiority of Open Firmware, most Macs of the past few years can't even boot from USB. While a coworker showed me a 4 year old Compaq D510 desktop with a bog standard BIOS booting and flawlessly running a pirated OS X 10.4.3 from an USB hard disk.

Rewind 4 years and we have USB1.1.

Booting from a 12mbits/s theoretical, 4mbits/s actual interface? No thanks.Macs have booted from 400mbits/s firewire for years.

Back to the present we have USB2, 480mbit/s theoretical. Modern macs boot fro

USB is meant for keyboards and mice. USB2 is meant for larger data transfers that are not sustained. Firewire is meant for sustained bulk data transfers.

USB2 is a crap way to boot your OS. Firewire will show much better performance. All Macs shipped in the last five or six years can boot from an external Firewire disk. Why should anyone want to boot from USB2?

Although some people might enjoy running their system like a piece of crap.

Who ever uses the Forth interpreter in Open Transport? Exactly the people it's meant for - device driver writers and system engineers. Do you think it's there for you?

And yes, I certainly believe some anonymous guy on the Internet when he spins out stories of old PCs running pirated OS X booted off USB devices. Maybe it was booting off a USB 1.0 pen drive, you know, a 32MB one. And maybe the PC ran it faster than any Mac. Maybe he found that at his freelance gig the Mac took 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file.

Lastly, if all the BIOS had to do was point the OS to the hard drive's boot sector, no PC on Earth would boot. It contains a lot of garbage that was useful 10-20 years ago but is irrelevant now. Why go EFI? Why go 64-bit? Why get more RAM? Why get a bigger hard drive? Why move forward in technology in any way at all?

I'm so glad that people like you don't make decisions. You'll be relegated to the sort of jobs where you don't get that choice, hopefully. When you actually look at issues, and understand the pros and cons, your opinion may carry some weight. Right now it's just hot air and fluff.

This is about as significant as Microsoft not releasing a PowerPC version of Vista.

Nope, this is much less significant.

Such announcement would be a huge boost for IBM and Motorola (the PowerPC makers), especially given the kick they have just taken from Apple (who for 15 years were 1/3 of the PowerPC trio of backers [wikipedia.org]).

A revival of Microsoft OS support for the PPC processor family in Vista (NT 6.0) would be a huge deal, given that they dropped it from NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) and NT 5.1 (Windows XP and 2003),

The problem with this idea, is that the MB manufacturers would have to license EFI from Intel. Intel developed EFI, and at present is the only one using EFI. So, the only way you end up with EFI right now is if you have an Intel MB. As far as all the MB manufacturers are concerned, EFI adds nothing substantial of value to a desktop machine, so why pay a competitor like Intel to license their technology, when Award makes a fine BIOS that does everything a desktop user would need, and then some?If it weren't

Steve Jobs actually tried this with NextStep, and learned a painful lesson. While NextStep was heralded for its stability and features on the Next hardware, as soon as it was "out in the wild" on commodity hardware, it was pretty much panned as a buggy, slow, cumbersome piece of garbage that never really sold or gained any major following.

There were a few reasons for this.

First off, the people who went out of their way to buy a Next box, much like macheads, had already decided that it was a wonderful machine before they ever turned it on, so were a bit more forgiving than someone just trying out the OS alongside others.

Secondly, it is a lot easier to develop an OS that only needs to run on one or two motherboards, with one or two chips, and one or two graphics systems, than it is to develop something that has to work with everything.

Thirdly, if you have complete control of the hardware, you can cheat on a lot of things. For example, if you know a feature crashes horribly on anything under a certain amount of RAM, then you can hold back that feature on any system that doesn't have enough RAM to handle it. When the user has control of the hardware, all you can do is make recommendations, and hope they abide by them, which almost without doubt, some won't.

Lastly, the number of bugs and problems you have to fix is limited to the number of users that have problems. Every piece of software as complex as an OS has bugs, if you have a few thousand users, the chances of them running across all the bugs is a lot smaller than if you have tens of thousands of users.

All of this, at the very least, taught Steve Jobs that trying to be Microsoft is harder than it looks. I think that Apple would probably make a ton of money if they could release their OS as a software product for commodity PCs, and would probably put a HUGE dent in the Linux market. However, I don't know if the company is really up to handling that, and I am quite sure that from his Next experience Jobs realizes the danger of trying to make that move when you aren't ready for it.

I dont understand why everyone is pushing the stories about running windows on macs.

Games. Dual-boot to Windows to run games.

Apple has been a software company since the Mac came out. They're just a software company that makes their money selling hardware, like Cisco. And if they had Cisco's market share they'd be smart to stick with that model. I don't see anyone pushing Cisco to sell IOS for Wintel hardware.